How you start your day is how you live your day. And how you live your days is how you live your life.

None of these ideas are mine and I can’t claim them. However, I can claim I know them to be true.

I first heard the idea about being intentional about the start of your day from Marianne Williamson. In her CD series, Meditations for a Miraculous Life, she says that in the morning your “mind is more open to receive new impressions than at any other time…

If you go directly to the news … radio or television that reports on the angst and the despair of the world, and particularly if you add caffeine, do not be mystified why you are depressed by noon.”

There are some sacred, valuable truths in this.

When I first heard this meditation I had to be honest with myself: I was doing all of these things. And it was showing.

I was often checking my email right out of bed. I was loading up on coffee. I definitely had the TV on minutes after turning off the alarm and I sure wasn’t meditating. Who has time for that?

Slowly, over the years these common morning practices were taking their toll. And I was ready to start trying something new. Kicking and screaming, my coffee habit has given way to hot tea or warm lemon water. More easily, the morning TV news habit has pushed to later in the morning. I don’t need to know the traffic report first thing, checking it out 15-20 minutes before my departure is sufficient.

The purpose isn’t to ignore the world or pretend bad things don’t happen. But to wisely select when you bring them into your day. Only you can determine what rituals and routines serve you best.

When my mind is open and impressionable, do I want to impress love or fear? That’s really what it came to for me.

In the month of October, we are setting an intention to Savor Life. What better way to spend your days, weeks, essentially your life, than by savoring it? But all the many things listed above, and far too many more to name, distract us, bombard and overwhelm us. On a regular basis, we may get to the end of a day and are not sure what we did, where we went or why it mattered.

Together, we hope that a collective commitment for 31 days of October can help all of us, individually and as a community, to have an intention to savor life. As an experiment or an exercise, we have set a “lens”, if you will, for each day and how you can use it to savor life. They are specific enough, we hope, that you have direction but open enough for you to put your own spin on it. It’s your life after all!

Keep a lookout for more details and also our calendar event on Facebook. You can join in, hopefully invite your friends, and we can start and end October with an experience that’s worthwhile.

 

Mostly sunshine,

Lowi & G